It was sort of my point that imperialisim is pretty hard to practice sucessfully with atrocities. It's not an easy or good thing to enslave another nation.
I was not sugesting genocide though. Just leveling cities as an example to other cites, and killing those closely related to rebels so they can't rebel without risking the lives of their whole family. Basicly a submit or die campain, similar to the roman policy for conquering cities.
I was also trying to say that I think that the US and others should act justly in all things. I personally think that good works best when you are good in all your actions, but evil and unjust actions also work best when you go for it full power. Lukewarm goodness is inefectual and you're still not acting justly. I think the US needs to choose what it wants to stand for, and then act on those beliefs.
Anyway, that provides a rough view of vision. I might be missing a few things but that's the general idea. Basically, go with non-intervention and dump the imperialism favoured by the modern elite.
One problem with a system of non-intervention is not all states will follow your plan, and you can't make them as that goes against your plan in itself. Annother is that most of the benifits come from long term use of non-intervention, and you may not be able to wait. And a third is that non-intervention does not help against expantionist regimes.
Many of the US's worst blunders happeded durring the cold war, when they had the clear and present danger of the USSR. They supplied and trained Bin Laden because they could not afford to let the USSR gain military inroads into the middle east. The middle eastern contries can't sell oil to anyone if they're siezed by the USSR.
If you look at WW2, Britain would have fallen to Germany without US aid, and then africa and probably both the middle east and russia. After Hitler consolidated his hold on europe, asia, and africa then who'd be next?
I pesonally think that what the US realy needs to do is to pick it's battles a little better, and follow through when they have to fight. They should have removed Saddam in the first war, and they shouldn't have ever started the second one. Also, if some guy that you trined as a terrorist says that he declares war on you, kill him.
I only stated what the problem is, as I see it. Any ideas that provokes as to solutions are your own, not mine; I sugest nothing.
Quite frankly, outright imperialism might work better than the half assed imperialism the americans are practicing now. But I don't think the american people have the will to be as brutal as that would require them to be (not that that's a bad thing). I mean real brutality, burning down cities and killing every last man, woman, and child or assasinating the entire extended family of terrorists or something. If you're not willing to be a heartless villan, don't try to be an imperialist. The thing with evil strategies is, they can work if you're commited enough.
Anyway, I didn't sugest any solutions because I'm not entirely satisfied with any of the ones I've thought of so far. It's not an easy problem to solve. Do you have any ideas for a moral and effective plan?
Of course they hate the US more now. That's beyond queastion. My point is that they believe they have an obligation to kill americans regardless of how they act.
I definitely agree that the american government and milatary have been cheerfully makeing a bad situation worse though.
But for either side, both bin laden and the american government, two wrongs don't make a right. I don't support either side murdering, kidnapping, and tortureing civilians.
A tiny minority of Muslims might actually believe anything remotely near to what you say.
Islam according to the extremeists compels the believer to attack the non-believer. They wouldn't be called extremeist if their opinions where common, but while they are a small minority they are large enough and well funded enough one to be taken seriosly.
The Israel situation has got absolutely nothing to to with "resisting conversion"... that is fundamentalist christian bullshit. It is to do with occupation, repression and desparation.
I agree it's all about occupation, repression and desperation. But the hard liners on both sides are trying to occupy and repress each other. Neither side's extremeists are willing to compromise.
Labeling me as a "fundamentalist christian" is a pathetic argument. Why do you have to try to label and demonize me to attack my point of veiw? The directive to convert by violence is in the Quran:
Surah 9:5 (Ali translation)
Fight and slay the pagans wherever you find them, and sieze them, beleager them, and lie in wait for them in every strategem (of war); but if they repent, and establish regular prayers and practice regular charity, then open thew way for them: for Allah is Oft-forgiving, most mercifull.
Surah 4:89 (the noble Quran)
Those who reject Islam must be killed. If they turn back (from Islam), take (hold of) them and kill them wherever you find them...
Surah 47:4 (the noble Quran)
So, when you meet (in fight - Jihad in Allah' cuase) those who disbelieve, smite (their) necks till when you have killed and wounded many of them, then bind a bond firmly (on them, i.e. take them as captives)
Surah 9:123 (the noble Quran)
O you who believe! Fight those of the disbelievers that are close to you, and let them find harshness in you; and know that Allah is with those that are Al-Muttaqun (the pious).
Surah 8:67 (The noble quran)
It is not for a Prophet that he should have prisoners of war (and free them for ransom) until he had made a great slaughter (among his enemies) in the land.
It is far better to argue with facts than by labels.
I believe his logic can best be explained as:
a)"When you poked the wasp nest you got stung"
b)"Poking the bee nest just to get back at the wasps will only make things worse"
According to the terrorist's interpretation of islamic law it is their duty to attack the US and all other non islamic states. They believe they are instructed to convert or kill all non islamic people. Those are your choices, join islam or die. This is not an rare interpretation of islamic law.
The US is considered an evil nation because it aids other nations (esp. israel) to resist being "converted by the sword". The surrounding arab nations would probably happily drive the jews into the sea.
The US is percieved to be a leader among the corupt (meaning non-islamic) western nations. Also, american media and culture are considered obcene by islamic standards.
The very fact that anyone non-islamic lives is an evil thing to these terrorists. They belive it is their religios duty to opress and kill you, with paridise guaranteed to them if they die for their cuase.
Not all muslims believe thus, but the groups who are driving planes into buildings do. The "wasps" where out to get you anyway.
Pretty much all currency is virtual now. You can't trade in the USD for gold anymore.
You can buy oil with MMORPG platinum pieces, you just have to convert them to a common trade curency first, just as you'd have to do that with real platinum coins.
That these corporations have effectively removed the part where works are supposed to go into the public domain for society's benefit as a whole pretty much nullifies any moral ground copyright laws once had. In my eyes (and I'm sure hundreds of you will disagree) downloading songs or what have you is pretty much the only effective form of civil disobedience against these fuckholes.
This is too funny. Show me where in copyright law it says that no one may place their work into the public domain until it would naturally do so? Oh, you can place your copyrighted work into public domain whenever you wish? Defeats that logic.
It doesn't defeat any logic. He's complaining that people are alowed avoid releasing copyrights into the public domain, not that they're barred from releasing copyrights into the public domain.
Copyrights are meant to encorage creation of copyrightable work so as in the long term to enhance the pool of art and knowlege in the public domain. They do this with short copyright terms. Longer terms do not result in significantly more copyrightable works being created and as such do not benifit society as much because they delay the full benifit of the copyrights til a later date.
Long term copyrights mainly benifit people who where inovative 30-50 years ago.
No one's being hurt, after all, since you couldn't afford them anyways.
Except, well, you're gaining something from their use and taking away a profit from those who created it. There are free alternatives to nearly every software package out there, so why not use them? If they don't meet your needs, lower your needs or raise your disposable income.
(empfasis mine)
How is it taking away a profit? If I copy something the origional still exists, so they can still sell it. They get no less money if I pirate something than if I never use it at all. This is why copyright violation is not theft.
I don't copy or support copying of copyrighted works, but copying copyrighted items is wrong only because it's illegal. Copyright law was writen and invented by mankind, it's not some kind of divine or moral imperitive.
IMHO spreading lies and disinformation about it being theft though, is in itself evil. Deception and lies are almost universaly acepted as being agaist either divine or moral imperitives.
Not so much so for an american citizen, especialy if you have usefull skills. The Canada/US border is hardly even enforced, near where I live it's barely distiguishable from a cattle fence, you can just pull down the wire and step over.
For a non-american it can be a little more difficult, but it's mainly just a very slow process. I know a family from france where the paperwork etc. took almost 3 years.
I thought the whole point of a tricorder was a portible package of a ton of sensors and a little computing power to run analisys of the data. Tricorders are used to measure stuff, not take notes. These things are more like the star trek data tablets if anything.
If you think oil plants are bad, look into coal fired plants. Not only do you get more smog but there are radioactives in coal, so the average coal fired power plant puts out scads more radioactive matter than a well run nuclear plant. (but i'm not counting the spent fuel rods)
And back (slightly) on track -- with the technology arriving yearly with faster and smaller hard-drives (mostly used in digital music devices) why do people still have giant (even a midi case is massive) cases on their desktops? Is it only due to standardised components, sizes, plugs, etc?
Minitureized stuff costs more. The mini hard drives that store 5GB or so cost about as much as a regular size drives 40X their capacity.
Digital music devices are made to be portable, and PCs are not. A better comparison would be digital music devices vs. laptops/tablet PCs.
That being said, I think a lot of the difference is because of PC's being expandible, and that a PC is much more capable than a MP3 player.
Sensationalist? I wish. While I was taking a class on windows 2000 a few years ago we where setting up a network of windows 2000 servers and about half had viruses before we could finish windows update.
You're right. As has been pointed out by others I should have said that it stops you from running anything but correctly signed code on the Super-MP3 files.
>How will Longhorn prevent simple file conversion tools from running?
As far as I know the Super-MP3s don't use longhorn, but if they did:
If you don't have longhorn the site that sells the songs and all computers that have bought them (and therefore need to have longhorn) will refuse to send you the file. You would be an un-trusted host.
If you do have longhorn, the file conversion tools are unsighned code. So you can't run them.
The N-Gage Does nothing well, it's: 1 A crappy game system 2 A heavily flawed phone
> people seem to take "hating the N-Gage" very personally
I object to the marketing and sale of crappy technology, and I suspect I'm not alone.
The N-Gage is so badly designed that it's one small step up from being outright defective. This device is flaws piled on defects.
I think it is morally wrong to sell people a product that is that badly designed. I don't think it's right to trade perfectly good money for technology that's so very poorly designed.
This is the reason (among others) that the first thing I do when I start using a copy of MS office is turn off all auto-formatting. It takes a little effort but it can be done.
> Clearcutting is a sign of bad government management of resources.
In many cases it's not so simple, the road to the logging site can do more dammage than a clearcut. (polluting streams with silt etc.) And some areas have steep enough terain that selective logging means you must use hellicopters to move the logs.
By crippling the drive they protect the value of their "high end" product while at the same time making some money on the "mid range" as well
The problem is that if a 200 GB drive is a high end level device then it probably has at least 3 platters and 6 heads because that's all you can fit easily into a standard size hard drive. Each platter would be aprox. 66 and 2/3 GB so you could omit the 6th head to save some costs on the 200GB as 150GB model.
Even better, if company A where to omit 2 heads and a platter they'd have a 133GB drive that's about 2/3 the cost to make. They could sell it full markup for $133, or sell it at the lower markup that company B have used on the $150 200GB labeled as a 150GB, making the price a mere $100 for 133GB and cutting the knees out from under their compitition.
Another thing to consider is most hard drive makers often have both newer and older technology in production. You may well have a factory line still tooled for producing 50GB platters that you could use to make a mid range 150GB drive. This let's you wait longer before paying to upgrade that line while still earning you money. Also when you do upgrade you can upgrade further, to a technology that was unavailable before.
"IBM Deskstar 80GB EIDE Yield after recovery: 150GB of space"
It's like selling a P4 3GHz chip as a P4 1.6 GHz chip. I know people underclock and such, but not by 87% of the item's stated speed or storage capacity.
It seems to work by deliberately corrupting your partition tabes by overlapping your patitions:
Partition a from 0 to 200 GB
Partition b from 1 to 200 GB etc.
You could probably get it to say almost any amount, but it wouldn't be usable space.
Some drives may have a little extra space but not 70 GB on a 80GB drive. No sane company is going to sell a 150 GB drive as an 80 GB because they pay as much to manufacture platters and heads no matter how they're used. The cost of the unused parts would come right out of their profits. Also, sometimes there is "unused space" used for the hard drive's bios, or for relocating data from bad sectors.
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Never. They're the same species as they can still breed and bear live offspring.
It was sort of my point that imperialisim is pretty hard to practice sucessfully with atrocities. It's not an easy or good thing to enslave another nation.
I was not sugesting genocide though. Just leveling cities as an example to other cites, and killing those closely related to rebels so they can't rebel without risking the lives of their whole family. Basicly a submit or die campain, similar to the roman policy for conquering cities.
I was also trying to say that I think that the US and others should act justly in all things. I personally think that good works best when you are good in all your actions, but evil and unjust actions also work best when you go for it full power. Lukewarm goodness is inefectual and you're still not acting justly. I think the US needs to choose what it wants to stand for, and then act on those beliefs.
Anyway, that provides a rough view of vision. I might be missing a few things but that's the general idea. Basically, go with non-intervention and dump the imperialism favoured by the modern elite.
One problem with a system of non-intervention is not all states will follow your plan, and you can't make them as that goes against your plan in itself. Annother is that most of the benifits come from long term use of non-intervention, and you may not be able to wait. And a third is that non-intervention does not help against expantionist regimes.
Many of the US's worst blunders happeded durring the cold war, when they had the clear and present danger of the USSR. They supplied and trained Bin Laden because they could not afford to let the USSR gain military inroads into the middle east. The middle eastern contries can't sell oil to anyone if they're siezed by the USSR.
If you look at WW2, Britain would have fallen to Germany without US aid, and then africa and probably both the middle east and russia. After Hitler consolidated his hold on europe, asia, and africa then who'd be next?
I pesonally think that what the US realy needs to do is to pick it's battles a little better, and follow through when they have to fight. They should have removed Saddam in the first war, and they shouldn't have ever started the second one. Also, if some guy that you trined as a terrorist says that he declares war on you, kill him.
I only stated what the problem is, as I see it. Any ideas that provokes as to solutions are your own, not mine; I sugest nothing.
Quite frankly, outright imperialism might work better than the half assed imperialism the americans are practicing now. But I don't think the american people have the will to be as brutal as that would require them to be (not that that's a bad thing). I mean real brutality, burning down cities and killing every last man, woman, and child or assasinating the entire extended family of terrorists or something. If you're not willing to be a heartless villan, don't try to be an imperialist. The thing with evil strategies is, they can work if you're commited enough.
Anyway, I didn't sugest any solutions because I'm not entirely satisfied with any of the ones I've thought of so far. It's not an easy problem to solve. Do you have any ideas for a moral and effective plan?
Of course they hate the US more now. That's beyond queastion. My point is that they believe they have an obligation to kill americans regardless of how they act.
I definitely agree that the american government and milatary have been cheerfully makeing a bad situation worse though.
But for either side, both bin laden and the american government, two wrongs don't make a right. I don't support either side murdering, kidnapping, and tortureing civilians.
Islam according to the extremeists compels the believer to attack the non-believer. They wouldn't be called extremeist if their opinions where common, but while they are a small minority they are large enough and well funded enough one to be taken seriosly.
The Israel situation has got absolutely nothing to to with "resisting conversion"... that is fundamentalist christian bullshit. It is to do with occupation, repression and desparation.
I agree it's all about occupation, repression and desperation. But the hard liners on both sides are trying to occupy and repress each other. Neither side's extremeists are willing to compromise.
Labeling me as a "fundamentalist christian" is a pathetic argument. Why do you have to try to label and demonize me to attack my point of veiw? The directive to convert by violence is in the Quran:
It is far better to argue with facts than by labels.
I believe his logic can best be explained as:
a)"When you poked the wasp nest you got stung"
b)"Poking the bee nest just to get back at the wasps will only make things worse"
According to the terrorist's interpretation of islamic law it is their duty to attack the US and all other non islamic states. They believe they are instructed to convert or kill all non islamic people. Those are your choices, join islam or die. This is not an rare interpretation of islamic law.
The US is considered an evil nation because it aids other nations (esp. israel) to resist being "converted by the sword". The surrounding arab nations would probably happily drive the jews into the sea.
The US is percieved to be a leader among the corupt (meaning non-islamic) western nations. Also, american media and culture are considered obcene by islamic standards.
The very fact that anyone non-islamic lives is an evil thing to these terrorists. They belive it is their religios duty to opress and kill you, with paridise guaranteed to them if they die for their cuase.
Not all muslims believe thus, but the groups who are driving planes into buildings do. The "wasps" where out to get you anyway.
>So much for Innocent until Proven Guilty.
It's inocent until proven guilty in a court of law, not don't investigate til proven guilty in a court of law.
Would you prefer they investigated the facts after they convicted you?
Have you thought of checking the hills in and around the campground to see if any of them have line of sight into a town?
You may only need 2 directional antenas instead of a satilite uplink.
setting up more and better public transit
driving smaller cars (tax the bigger ones)
putting more freight on the rail network (trains use less gas)
Taxing Electricity and use the money to subsidize purchases of energy smart apliances (much of the US's electric power is fossil fuel based)
Alchahol can be used in many engines if you adjust the fuel to air ratio
Use hefty commuter tolls going into major cities to encourage use of public transit
Try to make public transit less unpleasant, larger seats and cleaner interiors etc.
Pretty much all currency is virtual now. You can't trade in the USD for gold anymore.
You can buy oil with MMORPG platinum pieces, you just have to convert them to a common trade curency first, just as you'd have to do that with real platinum coins.
It doesn't defeat any logic. He's complaining that people are alowed avoid releasing copyrights into the public domain, not that they're barred from releasing copyrights into the public domain.
Copyrights are meant to encorage creation of copyrightable work so as in the long term to enhance the pool of art and knowlege in the public domain. They do this with short copyright terms. Longer terms do not result in significantly more copyrightable works being created and as such do not benifit society as much because they delay the full benifit of the copyrights til a later date.
Long term copyrights mainly benifit people who where inovative 30-50 years ago.
No one's being hurt, after all, since you couldn't afford them anyways.
Except, well, you're gaining something from their use and taking away a profit from those who created it. There are free alternatives to nearly every software package out there, so why not use them? If they don't meet your needs, lower your needs or raise your disposable income.
(empfasis mine)
How is it taking away a profit? If I copy something the origional still exists, so they can still sell it. They get no less money if I pirate something than if I never use it at all. This is why copyright violation is not theft.
I don't copy or support copying of copyrighted works, but copying copyrighted items is wrong only because it's illegal. Copyright law was writen and invented by mankind, it's not some kind of divine or moral imperitive.
IMHO spreading lies and disinformation about it being theft though, is in itself evil. Deception and lies are almost universaly acepted as being agaist either divine or moral imperitives.
> Isn't it hard as hell to emmigrate to Canada?
Not so much so for an american citizen, especialy if you have usefull skills. The Canada/US border is hardly even enforced, near where I live it's barely distiguishable from a cattle fence, you can just pull down the wire and step over.
For a non-american it can be a little more difficult, but it's mainly just a very slow process. I know a family from france where the paperwork etc. took almost 3 years.
I thought the whole point of a tricorder was a portible package of a ton of sensors and a little computing power to run analisys of the data. Tricorders are used to measure stuff, not take notes. These things are more like the star trek data tablets if anything.
If you think oil plants are bad, look into coal fired plants. Not only do you get more smog but there are radioactives in coal, so the average coal fired power plant puts out scads more radioactive matter than a well run nuclear plant. (but i'm not counting the spent fuel rods)
And back (slightly) on track -- with the technology arriving yearly with faster and smaller hard-drives (mostly used in digital music devices) why do people still have giant (even a midi case is massive) cases on their desktops? Is it only due to standardised components, sizes, plugs, etc?
Minitureized stuff costs more. The mini hard drives that store 5GB or so cost about as much as a regular size drives 40X their capacity.
Digital music devices are made to be portable, and PCs are not. A better comparison would be digital music devices vs. laptops/tablet PCs.
That being said, I think a lot of the difference is because of PC's being expandible, and that a PC is much more capable than a MP3 player.
Sensationalist? I wish. While I was taking a class on windows 2000 a few years ago we where setting up a network of windows 2000 servers and about half had viruses before we could finish windows update.
Longhorn will run unsigned software.
You're right. As has been pointed out by others I should have said that it stops you from running anything but correctly signed code on the Super-MP3 files.
Otherwise, it would be totally useless.
You've used microsoft's products before, right?
>How will Longhorn prevent simple file conversion tools from running?
As far as I know the Super-MP3s don't use longhorn, but if they did:
If you don't have longhorn the site that sells the songs and all computers that have bought them (and therefore need to have longhorn) will refuse to send you the file. You would be an un-trusted host.
If you do have longhorn, the file conversion tools are unsighned code. So you can't run them.
The N-Gage Does nothing well, it's:
1 A crappy game system
2 A heavily flawed phone
> people seem to take "hating the N-Gage" very personally
I object to the marketing and sale of crappy technology, and I suspect I'm not alone.
The N-Gage is so badly designed that it's one small step up from being outright defective. This device is flaws piled on defects.
I think it is morally wrong to sell people a product that is that badly designed. I don't think it's right to trade perfectly good money for technology that's so very poorly designed.
This is the reason (among others) that the first thing I do when I start using a copy of MS office is turn off all auto-formatting. It takes a little effort but it can be done.
> Clearcutting is a sign of bad government management of resources.
In many cases it's not so simple, the road to the logging site can do more dammage than a clearcut. (polluting streams with silt etc.) And some areas have steep enough terain that selective logging means you must use hellicopters to move the logs.
By crippling the drive they protect the value of their "high end" product while at the same time making some money on the "mid range" as well
The problem is that if a 200 GB drive is a high end level device then it probably has at least 3 platters and 6 heads because that's all you can fit easily into a standard size hard drive. Each platter would be aprox. 66 and 2/3 GB so you could omit the 6th head to save some costs on the 200GB as 150GB model.
Even better, if company A where to omit 2 heads and a platter they'd have a 133GB drive that's about 2/3 the cost to make. They could sell it full markup for $133, or sell it at the lower markup that company B have used on the $150 200GB labeled as a 150GB, making the price a mere $100 for 133GB and cutting the knees out from under their compitition.
Another thing to consider is most hard drive makers often have both newer and older technology in production. You may well have a factory line still tooled for producing 50GB platters that you could use to make a mid range 150GB drive. This let's you wait longer before paying to upgrade that line while still earning you money. Also when you do upgrade you can upgrade further, to a technology that was unavailable before.
486 DX as an SX...
"IBM Deskstar 80GB EIDE Yield after recovery: 150GB of space"
It's like selling a P4 3GHz chip as a P4 1.6 GHz chip. I know people underclock and such, but not by 87% of the item's stated speed or storage capacity.
It seems to work by deliberately corrupting your partition tabes by overlapping your patitions:
Partition a from 0 to 200 GB
Partition b from 1 to 200 GB etc.
You could probably get it to say almost any amount, but it wouldn't be usable space.
Some drives may have a little extra space but not 70 GB on a 80GB drive. No sane company is going to sell a 150 GB drive as an 80 GB because they pay as much to manufacture platters and heads no matter how they're used. The cost of the unused parts would come right out of their profits. Also, sometimes there is "unused space" used for the hard drive's bios, or for relocating data from bad sectors.